Your Story + Your Passion = Ideal Client Magnet
“So, how did you get started doing this work? What attracted you?”
When I thought I had to hide who I was, I hated answering this question! I had a stock answer, and gave it from memory, as if I were reading a mental note that got shorter and shorter over time.
Everything changed as soon as I began to embrace my story.
As I learned to talk about the obstacles I’ve overcome, I realized that it helps people understand how we’re connected. Everything became easier, more natural — and I began to welcome talking about it!
Then I discovered what happens when I let people to see the passion that underlies my story — and things changed dramatically!
People have so many choices nowadays that they just don’t stay where they don’t want to be. The truth is, we all close the books or turn off the movies we don’t understand, or that ramble with no point, don’t speak to us, don’t move us in some way. We’re not interested unless we “get” the appeal.
It’s not much different with your life story. Although your whole life brought you to today, it’s not all pertinent or interesting to your Ideal Client, so it’s important to work on your story as one part of your overall practice-building plan.
These are critical steps in telling your story with passion:
Uncover the important parts of your story.
Be ruthless in getting rid of the things that you love to talk about, even though they really aren’t necessary or don’t support the point! This is hard for many Feldenkrais® practitioners, because we love detail and find it endlessly interesting. The skill here is to determine which detail is important and which is distracting.
Learn to tell your story so that it’s compelling.
A great plot can suffer from bad telling. Just read any book that was written from the movie to see what I mean. To really engage people, you need to help them feel something from your story. That probably means you have to allow yourself feel it, too!
Practice telling it until it’s easy.
We’d all love to believe that if it’s real, we don’t have to rehearse it. Unfortunately, it just isn’t true. Most of us get smaller when we first think about telling a difficult story about ourselves. You can only make yourself bigger by practicing. Just like with our work — awareness doesn’t grow by being used once in a while.
Learn when to tell it.
Your story is a great story –– telling it can accomplish great things — like inspiring a new client or helping a group to connect with you quickly. Telling your story at the right times, and in the right places will help your Ideal Clients find you much more easily. Don’t squander it — know what it does and use it with intention.
Your story is a critical component of your business. And that means that if you learn to tell it with passion, you can do much more good with your work than if you hide it.
If you aren’t sure what your story should be about, or how to tell it, click here to find out what could change, if you and I worked together on it!
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“It must be fully realized from the start that the learning process is irregular and consists of steps, and that there will be downs as well as ups” — Moshe Feldenkrais, in Awareness Through Movement, p. 8
4 thoughts on “To Get More Clients, Treasure Your Life Story, Tell It with Passion”
Hi Allison,
Throughout history the storyteller was always given the best seat, the one next to the fire, then everyone gathered around to listen to a long tale. Humans love stories. Sooner or later I will find mine and be able to tell it in my own way.
Yes, you will, Heather. And like everything you do, it will be spectacular. And I’ll bet you’ll be surprised when you find it because I think it’s sitting right in front of your nose at this very minute!
In response to Moshe’s quote… “downs as well as ups”….Love the” ups”! I think, in the back of our minds, we all have some idea that we will reach that “smooth sailing” place in our lives if we just finish one last thing. How to accept and manage well the fluctuations in my life is an ongoing goal of mine. And sometimes I can achieve that goal and other times I can expend too much energy judging just how I’m managing, what I said or did that was “wrong”. This creates emotions that dig up the gremlins and impede my process…just another “down”?
charlottechavez.com
Charlotte, your Marketing Style is one that wants everything to be right — all the ripples to be settled — before you commit. I think this is some of where the ‘just one last thing’ comes from… if you can morph that into ‘just one thing’ and more the ONE the most important one, then it will be easier to take a step. The pitfall of ‘getting it all right in advance’ is that the stakes are very high by the time you put it out there and ‘getting it wrong’ is a real fear. If you can see a lesser effort as information that will tell you what to tweak, it can help with the forward movement.